One lesson of Apollo’s surprising unpopularity is that the program was sustained by leaders within NASA and the White House, which never pulled the plug on an audacious task that polled poorly among the public. Kennedy was right when he said, “We choose to go to the moon.” So did we choose to pass the New Deal, just as we chose to build OSRD, just as we chose to invent the bones of the internet in a government lab, just as we chose to break the record for vaccine development during a pandemic. Yes, crisis is a focusing mechanism. But leaders define what counts as a crisis. And leaders are the
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